Difficulty playing 720p or higher videos on my notebook

[elcoyoteloco]

Hi all,

When I try to play videos that are 720p or higher (usually MKV BluRay rips), the audio and video will quickly get out of synch. If I stop and restart they'll get back in synch for a minute or two until the problem reoccurs. This happens with different players, and Task Manager shows a major spike in overall resource usage.

I'm pretty sure the problem is that my old laptop is simply too obsolete for these newer videos, but I'd like to confirm that. Here's my specs:

HP Pavilion ZD8000 Notebook
XP MCE SP3
Dual Core Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.20GHz
2GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon X600 (128MB)

Is it the CPU, the RAM, or the video card that's too weak, or my system as a whole?

Thanks

PS: I'm planning on a major notebook upgrade in August, but on the off-chance there's something I can do with my current notebook to play these, I'd love to hear it. Thanks again

[redwudz]

Your CPU is a bit weak, but I think your video chip is more likely the problem. A X3000 would be more suited to HD playback. But have you tried MPC-HC? It works fairly well with HD video.

And welcome to our forums.

[ChrissyBoy]

CoreAVC may help you as your CPU is on the cusp of being able to play 720p

[elcoyoteloco]

Thanks guys.

@redwudz: I've tried MPCHC, jetAudio and VLC. Same results in all three, which is why I was thinking the issue was hardware related.

@Chrissyboy: I'll give that a try.

[creamyhorror]

You need to make sure MPC-HC is using multithreaded decoding. Play a H.264 video, right-click in the playback area, Filter > MPC Video Decoder, and look for an option to set threads to 2 (since yours is a dual-core). If there's no such option, you're probably using too old a copy of MPC-HC.

A better option is to install DivX's H.264 decoder (via its codec pack), which is multithreaded and very fast - probably matched with CoreAVC Pro.

Your video card is irrelevant: it can't do DXVA/hardware decoding of H.264. VLC is no use either, because it doesn't have multithreaded decoding capability (so it can't use both of your CPU's cores).

[elcoyoteloco]

You need to make sure MPC-HC is using multithreaded decoding. Play a H.264 video, right-click in the playback area, Filter > MPC Video Decoder, and look for an option to set threads to 2 (since yours is a dual-core). If there's no such option, you're probably using too old a copy of MPC-HC.

A better option is to install DivX's H.264 decoder (via its codec pack), which is multithreaded and very fast - probably matched with CoreAVC Pro.

Your video card is irrelevant: it can't do DXVA/hardware decoding of H.264. VLC is no use either, because it doesn't have multithreaded decoding capability (so it can't use both of your CPU's cores).

Thanks, I didn't know about that. However, I just tried to play an MKV movie that I'm pretty sure is HD (it's 3.5GB) but I'm not seeing that setting. I just installed the latest MPCHC beta, btw.

I'm going to sound like a total noob (which I am. lol), but could you tell me how I can check to see if the file is H.264?

Thanks again

[Ai Haibara]

Run the MKV through MediaInfo, in Tree View. It'll give you quite a bit of information about the video.

[jagabo]

MPCHC: while the video is playing right click on the window and select Filters -> MPC Video Decoder. Set the Decoding Thread Number to 2. You can also use View -> Options... select Internal Filters in the left pane, then in the Transform Filters box double click on the h264/AVC filter to bring up the dialog. Exit MPCHC and restart it for the change to take effect. Both of these assume you are using MPCHC's internal h.264 decoder.

The Video Renderer can have an effect on playback too. View -> Options -> Playback -> Output. Try the different DirectShow Video renderers. System Default, Overlay Mixer, VMR7, etc. Again you have to exit and restart MPCHC for the change to take effect.